That Saloon Thang

There's loads of saloons in Al Ain, in fact there are loads of them in the UAE. They have to round the cowboys up at closing time when they're all swinging on them saloon doors having drunk too much wallop. Often you'll find a guy playing honky tonk in the corner, the gas lights flicker and then in walks the local hoodlum, guns a-blazin'. Everyone ducks under chairs, the buxom broad upstairs starts screaming and then it all goes quiet. The lights go back on and it appears that the hood has left and everything returns to normal once the glass has been cleared up and the sawdust changed.

We don't have this kind of excitement in Al Ain saloons. Oh no, just a quick trim and a splash of scent. The rest of the world call them SALONS. Hats off to the one place in Al Ain that's got it right: Lou Lou Salon near Choithrams and that's coz the lady who runs it knows French. They do a great eyebrow thread, by the way...















Getting ready for guns at high noon.....

More on that exodus

42% of EFL teaching staff in Al Ain are downing whiteboard markers and leaving according to this. They're not the only ones. A large percentage of faculty from the main higher education institutions are off as well.

It seems that whoever controls the salary budgets are happy to sit back and do nothing about it, confident that there will be an endless supply of high quality teachers willing to work for peanuts. Meanwhile, UAE students' education will suffer.

Unless more money is invested in education- not the buildings, not the computers but your greatest resource of all, human beings, then the future looks bleak for HE in the UAE.